


Celebrate Brave Sanctuary

by dollylux



Series: Fic Advent Calendar 2015: Siblings, Husbands, Lovely Ladies, and Other Miscreants [16]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Broken Sam, M/M, Mentions of Underage Sex, Soulless Sam Winchester, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 03:13:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5441381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean spends Christmas with his soulless brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Celebrate Brave Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookdal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookdal/gifts).



> day sixteen | prompt: unopened gift

Sam’s eyes are different now.

He holds them differently, his gaze more cunning and fox-eyed, eyebrows slightly higher, his pupils rarely dilated.

Dean’s real good at pretending. He can pretend when they’re in the car together, with Sam’s familiar bulk and lank at his side, can pretend when he sees the back of Sam’s head when they’re stalking down some nightmare during a hunt, he can even pretend when they’re talking while Dean’s cleaning his gun or eating or when they’re seated side-by-side at a greasy, forgotten bar.

It just takes one look from Sam, one glimpse of those eyes that are still the same colors, even after enduring hellfire, and he’s reminded all over again. Lost in the truth; this ain’t his Sammy.

 

“Where to now?”

Dean doesn’t respond for a minute. He’s fresh out of the shower, dripping water all over the ratty carpet of this shithole motel room, digging around in his bag for something vaguely clean to wear.

They need to do some damn laundry.

He lets the towel drop and can feel those eyes on him, the ones without a soul behind them, can feel them like nails along his spine. He swallows hard and tugs underwear up onto his body, hiding all the most appealing parts of himself, seeking reprieve from Sam’s hunger.

“Dunno,” he finally replies, forcing the shake out of his voice. He slides a t-shirt on that he knows is actually Sam’s, and he realizes when he turns around finally, at that ravenous look in Sam’s eyes, that he knows it, too. “Figured we’d sleep. I’m fuckin’ exhausted, man.”

Truth is, Dean is barely functioning anymore. Sometimes, he thinks he keeps on existing just out of habit, because the day-to-day things are his only comfort anymore, and they’re what’s incidentally keeping him alive. 

He doesn’t choose pants--sweatpants or jeans--because he has to see how this conversation plays out.

“Okay,” Sam says more readily than his real Sam would. Soulless Sam doesn’t argue nearly as much, seems to trust Dean like a war-weary dog, like Dean is the only thing he can trust to make decisions for him. It should be comforting, but it’s fucking terrifying.

Sam’s stubbornness, infuriating as it is, is one of Dean’s favorite things about him.

Dean squints at him, sweatpants clutched in his hand.

“You tired?” he asks.

Sam shrugs, so loose-bodied now, so in command where his Sam had never lost his teenage awkwardness, his self-consciousness. Not ever.

“I don’t really… get tired,” Sam reminds him, hands going to his narrow hips. “But I can just hang out while you sleep. We can just--”

“Nah, I’m…” Dean takes a deep breath, turning to shove the sweats back in the bag and pulling out his jeans. The idea of Sam--this Sam--watching him sleep never fails to unnerve him. “We can just stop for coffee on the way out. I’m good.”

“I can drive,” Sam offers, like he’s strangely eager to please. Dean grits his teeth as he pulls his jeans on, letting them hang off his hips while he drags the towel through his hair, soaking up the last of the dripping water from it. Sam’s eyes find the open V of his jeans, seeming obsessed by the pale gold of his happy trail visible there. 

Dean watches Sam watching him and represses a shudder.

“I’ll meet you in the car,” is all he says in reply before disappearing back into the bathroom.

 

“Christmas is comin’ up,” Dean says into the quiet of the car. The windows are fogged up a little because of the wet cold of a Florida winter, the incredible heat of Sam’s body making the inside of the car steamy. That, at least, isn’t new.

“Yeah,” Sam says, glancing over at Dean in the dark. It comes out like a question, like a “yeah so?” that makes Dean’s chest ache. “And..?”

“I dunno. Figured maybe we’d head up north. Chase the winter, you know? Fuckin’ Florida ain’t a place to spend Christmas.” He reaches up to fiddle with the nobs, trying to push back the fog on the windshield.

“Why not? Seems like a ton of people do it every year.” Sam sounds so matter-of-fact, so blank that it makes Dean feel violent. He grips the wheel and forces his eyes straight ahead on the empty, damp highway just outside of Gainesville. 

“Yeah, idiots do it,” he gruffs. His hatred of Florida is a badly-kept secret. He’d barely wanted to take that hunt because it brought them down here. “I ain’t decoratin’ a palm tree.”

Sam snorts quietly, the shake of his head rustling up the scent of their shampoo from his long hair. Dean misses that smell on Sam. Misses burying his face in the thick warmth of it and breathing in their shared scent.

“So, what? You want to decorate a regular tree?” Sam is smirking now, only seconds away from mocking, soulless or not. Dean glares at him in the dark.

“I want to decorate a fuckin’ Christmas tree, like a regular person. And we’re drivin’ ‘til we hit snow, got it?” The steering wheel creaks under his painfully tight grip.

“Okay, okay,” Sam acquiesces, big hands lifted in surrender. “Whatever you want, Dean.”

There’s still an amused smile on Sam’s face, Dean can tell. Even in the dark. Normally, it would soften him up, make him smile, too. Make him reach over and seek out Sam’s long fingers. But this isn’t normal. And maybe it’ll never be normal again.

“Whatever I want,” he mutters under his breath as he presses his foot down on the gas. The impossibility of that makes him want to jerk the wheel and send them racing down the sharp decline past the guardrail, wants to let this car that is their only home smash into the forest below, let the thick steel of her fold up around them and crush them, destroy them both in what can only be considered a mercy killing. 

But neither he or this Sam deserve that kind of grace.

He refocuses on the road, squares his shoulders, and prays for snow.

 

It’s sleeting by the time they hit Chattanooga, and it’s nearly noon when they drive up into the congested nestle of a place called Gatlinburg in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. There are signs everywhere, choking the scenery with bright bursts of words about attractions, shops, restaurants, and places to stay. Snow is actually falling here, coating everything in a pretty, dreamy blanket of white.

Dean pulls into what looks like a motel crappy enough to be in their price range and kills the engine, leaving them in silence. He’s running on fumes, his legs shaking with exhaustion, but he doesn’t give himself time to settle into the exhaustion or the pain.

“C’mon,” he says, opening the door and lifting up out of the car.

He gets them a room for five days, hauls his bag out of the car, and falls down onto the bed nearest the door. He’s out before Sam even makes it inside.

When he wakes up, it’s dark, pitch black inside the stuffy room. He flicks on the lamp between the beds and finds the other one predictably untouched, empty. He doesn’t know why he bothers to get two beds anymore, maybe just more of his pathetic clinging to the past.

Sam is gone but the car’s still here, and Dean takes a minute while he’s changing to worry about him, to wonder if he’d bothered to put an actual coat on, if he’d just gone out seeking a cup of coffee to warm his hands or if he was traipsing through the still-falling snow, slowly but steadily letting himself be buried by winter.

He knows rationally that Sam’s body can withstand the cold just like he can withstand heat and not sleeping and not eating and not doing any goddamn thing except watching, calculating, fucking, and killing, but he can’t help but worry.

That’s still his Sam’s body, and Dean will worry over that because it’s the only thing he’s got left.

 

He ventures out to the grocery store and grabs a few things: milk, coffee, sugar, bread, bologna, and five cases of beer. He buys enough coolers and ice to store it all, not thinking too hard about the other things in his cart; the 3-foot Christmas tree, two boxes of lights, some boxes of ornaments, and an angel he’d picked out who looked exactly like Mom.

He puts his gift for Sam on the conveyor belt last, not even glancing at it because he doesn’t want to change his mind.

 

He’s still decorating by the time Sam gets in around midnight, attaching hooks to each ornament in the box carefully before he even thinks about taking them out.

Sam comes in with a sharp burst of frigid air, holding a bag of McDonald’s and a tray with two massive drinks on it.

“Merry Christmas,” he says, his teeth chattering, snow clinging to his hair. He’s worryingly flushed, his hands frozen and chapped with cold. It doesn’t seem to bother him though, and he’s smiling in a way that isn’t predatory as he sets the food down in front of Dean at the little table in front of the window.

Dean will take a truce on Christmas Eve.

Sam takes a shower with the door open after they eat, steam billowing out along with a bright sliver of fluorescence that takes away some of the magic of the tree’s Christmas lights.

He comes out naked and dripping wet, more ripped than his Sam ever was, his muscles tensed and mouth-watering as he stalks across the room, past where Dean is methodically hanging ornaments. Sam falls down into the chair he’d sat in to eat, his thighs spread wide, the enormous, heavy girth of his cock laying half-hard along the right one.

“Could put some clothes on,” Dean manages through gritted teeth, having to be extra careful not to squeeze the ornament in his hand and shatter it. He very pointedly doesn’t look over at him, doesn’t react to those eyes that he can feel burning on him, to the heat that he swears he can feel wafting from Sam’s body or the scent of his thick cock.

“Do you remember when I used to skip breakfast so I could choke on your dick better? So you could fuck my throat as hard as we wanted and I wouldn’t throw up?” His voice is almost innocent, like he’s asking Dean if he remembers Christmas specials they used to watch on TV as kids. Dean loses the fight with the bulb, but instead of getting crushed, it falls from his hand and explodes on the floor in a burst of red glass that looks too much like blood.

He lowers his head and closes his eyes. Forces himself to breathe.

“Stop it,” he growls. Pleads.

Sam is up then, moving toward him like Dean is a meal, nothing but prey. He doesn’t move. Sam presses along his back, that burning cock digging right up against the small of it, rutting mindlessly. Dean knows that Sam wants him out of muscle memory, out of instinct. That this is nothing but an animal hunger in Sam. This is nothing like what it was before, with his Sammy.

He arches his back, makes his ass push out soft for Sam to grind against. And maybe that’s his own instinct kicking in.

“And you used to eat me out for hours. You’d rub your whole face all over my hole. Suck on it like it was a tit. Wanted it to feel soft like a pussy, didn’t you?” Sam’s hands are on his hips, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, his mouth at the back of Dean’s neck, behind his ear, right on that sweet spot that makes his knees shake.

Of course Sam remembers that.

“Sammy,” he begs, eyebrows drawing up tight together while he sucks on his bottom lip. He puts a hand out to brace on the table so they don’t fall into the tree.

“I was thirteen, Dean,” Sam breathes, tongue running over the shell of Dean’s flushed ear. “I was just a boy. You were coming inside of me while I was still in middle school.”

The memory of it, of Sam’s desperately young pink insides, of the taste of him, the sounds he used to make, drags a groan out of Dean that comes from so deep it hurts. Sam’s hands slide around to rub Dean’s dick through his jeans, knead at his full balls.

“Point is,” Sam continues, already breathless himself from where he’s rubbing his bare cock against Dean’s ass, “this, us, right now… it wouldn’t be the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever done. Right?”

“You ain’t my Sammy,” Dean groans, head tipping back to rest on Sam’s broad shoulder. They’re moving together like Sam’s already inside of him.

“No? Then how do I know what you like? How you like to be fingered while you’re fucking me? Practically took my whole fist once, that year when your clock was ticking. You were so desperate then. I remember exactly how your hole felt around my fingers. I remember exactly what it felt like to milk you from the inside so you could load me up. I remember how you cried when I kept goin’ after you had nothing left to give.” Sam squeezes his balls through his jeans, fingers pressing against his taint.

“Always wanted to give you more,” Dean tells him, his face flushing for the painful truth of it. 

“I had to beg for you to let me fuck you back then. You felt too exposed. Too vulnerable. Wouldn’t give this ass up to me unless it was my birthday.” He can feel Sam’s fingers on his belt, his zipper. His heart is throbbing in his ears.

“Or Christmas,” Dean breathes. He can imagine with vivid, sweaty clarity just how this Sam would fuck him, the gorgeous violence of his powerful body, the unforgiving savagery he would inflict on Dean, chasing his own animal hunger, his body’s instinctive satisfaction.

“Let me in,” Sam husks, right against his ear. He pushes Dean’s suddenly undone jeans down, dragging his underwear with them. His dick is pulsing right against the curve of his bare ass now, pushing greedily between his cheeks. He kisses at Dean’s neck, tongue out to lick wet and filthy at his sweaty, tired skin while they strain against each other. “God, Dean. Let me into this gorgeous body. Miss it so fuckin’ bad.”

It occurs to Dean suddenly that it’s amazing Sam is asking, that his instincts haven’t just taken over completely and made him grab Dean and push him down on the bed and force his way inside with nothing but spit to ease the way. 

“No,” he says with a sharp intake of air, just as he feels the head of Sam’s cock nudge at his dry hole, so fat it feels like a curled fist trying to punch into him. He clenches up hard and shies away, reaching down to tug his briefs and jeans back up.

He turns around and looks up at Sam, reminded with an immediacy that borders on cruel that this is a creature wearing Sam’s body, that everything that makes Sam _Sam_ is missing. 

That fucking this Sam would be the very worst kind of betrayal, something he could never come back from. Not when he finally gets his boy back.

Sam is staring at him in a rare moment of true anger, frustration pulling on his mouth, making it thin, his jaw tensed with barely contained fury.

“You won’t let me fuck you?” he asks flatly.

Dean fixes his jeans back and buckles his belt, arms folding over his chest in a move that makes him feel little, too young for this. He forces himself to hold Sam’s gaze, to fight for dominance anyway.

“Nope,” he replies. Raises his eyebrows at Sam.

Sam groans, pushing his hands into his damp hair. Dean looks down at how fucking hard Sam is, his cock so red it’s nearly purple at the tip and dripping with slick, the whole length of him just over nine inches that Dean knows with an intimacy that verges on addiction. He licks his lips.

“Will you suck me?” Sam asks, soft and pleading. He grabs the heft of his dick in one fist and slides the fingers of his other hand into Dean’s hair, already trying to ease him down to his knees.

Dean growls, reaching up to push Sam’s hand away and shoving past him to escape the heat of what they’d been doing. His cheeks are hot, his own dick tenting in his pants, and he needs to get fucked so bad that he’s almost manic.

“Can’t we just… fuckin’ cuddle or something?!” he explodes in words that he immediately regrets, that he hopes to God Sam forgets when they finally get his soul back in him or Dean knows he’ll never, ever live it down.

Sam is staring at him, his face utterly blank.

“You want to cuddle?” he ventures with his pornstar dick still swaying heavily in front of him. He puts his hands on his narrow hips and raises an eyebrow at Dean. “Are you kidding?”

“Look, I just,” Dean sighs, gesturing around the room. “I got stuff to decorate the tree, we’ve got that bottle of rum still, and _A Christmas Story_ is playing for the rest of eternity on TBS. And… hey, look. I even got you a present.”

He rushes over to his bed and grabs the present that he’d already wrapped up, hurrying back over to hold it out for Sam like a consolation prize, a replacement for getting to pound his tight ass.

Sam stares down at it, his lips pursed like he’s thinking, considering. He gives Dean one last glance before he pushes past him, grabbing his duffel on the way to the bathroom. He slams the door so hard, the ornaments rattle on the tree.

“Fuck,” Dean breathes softly, letting out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He drops Sam’s gift on the table and sinks down in the chair, pushing his fingers up into his hair and resting his eyes on the heels of his hands. 

It occurs to him, sudden and out of nowhere, that he has never felt more truly alone in his entire life.

Sam emerges completely dressed, boots and all, from the bathroom. He grabs his coat from his unmade bed and opens the door to the outside world, letting in lazy drifts of snow.

“Where are you going?” Dean manages, his voice shaky, eyes wet and weary as he stares at his brother’s face.

“I’ll be back before we head out,” Sam tells him, not even sparing him another glance before he’s gone, pulling the door closed behind him. The quiet that follows is so absolute it’s nearly intolerable. He grabs the unopened bottle of rum from the table near Sam’s gift and blindly peels the seal from it, twists it open, and tips it back to pour into his throat.

So began his Christmas of absolute silence.

 

\--

“What’s this?” 

“Hm?” Dean glances over from his futile task of trying to untangle Christmas lights and squints at the curved breadth of Sam’s back and shoulders. 

Sam’s so much more fragile now that his wall has been torn down, destroyed by that son of a bitch angel. He’s soft, frayed around the edges and skittery like an abused animal, his hair longer than ever and framing his tired face. He turns his careful, little-boy eyes on Dean, and that’s all it takes for Dean to drop what he’s doing and go to him.

“What’ve you got?” Dean asks gently, dropping down to a crouch next to where Sam is sitting on the floor in Rufus’s cabin. He sinks his fingers into the greasy, still-lovely fall of Sam’s hair and rubs at his scalp; so violently, painfully desperate to protect Sam, to keep him safe all the time now that it takes every ounce of energy left in him not to pull Sam close, to tuck him up against himself.

Sam’s holding a package of some kind in his hands, and Dean can only stare at it, recognizing the wrapping paper, the carefully taped seams immediately.

“Dean?” Sam turns to look at him, sounding too hesitant, too anxious for Dean to lie. 

“It’s for you,” he sighs, settling in on the floor beside Sam, their shoulders pressing together. “I got it for you last year, when…”

“When I didn’t have a soul,” Sam finishes for him, much more comfortable talking about than Dean will ever be. Dean only nods, unable to take his eyes off of Sam’s hands, off the way they smooth almost reverently over the paper. He turns those eyes on Dean again, looking hopeful this time. “Can I open it?”

“Uh,” Dean starts, his heart rate kicking up. He reaches up to rub the back of his neck. “Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you want to, I guess.”

Sam smiles, their eyes meeting finally. Those are his Sammy’s eyes right there, the look he only gives Dean, so soft and open and bared for him, three things that the Sam from last Christmas couldn’t have managed if his life had depended on it.

It’s just a reminder, a welcome one, that his little brother is back, really back. He’ll take the destroyed wall in Sam’s mind, the seizures, the presence of Lucifer probably right here in this cabin. He’ll take it all because that’s actually Sam, smiling at him right now.

Dean can’t help but lean over and kiss his curved, chapped mouth.

Sam tears into the year-old paper with the excitement of a little boy, and he stares at the unveiled gift in absolute silence for a very long moment.

“I know it’s cheesy,” Dean says, having to look away from it, from this whole thing. He grabs the tangle of Christmas lights to busy his hands. “It was a stupid idea then, too, don’t worry. I just thought… I don’t know, thought maybe you’d like a reminder of--”

Sam’s hands are on his face, sudden and warm, and his head is being turned to face Sam again. His mouth is taken in a kiss so intense, so real, that he just closes his eyes and sinks into it, sighs across Sam’s scruffy face.

They’re holding each other by the time the kiss ends, Sam all but tucked into Dean’s lap, his arms around his neck. The framed picture of them, just a silly one they’d taken of themselves when they’d spent the night out in a field in Nebraska when they’d run out of gas and money but the night was warm and full of stars and they’d found an old disposable camera in the trunk, is laid out in Sam’s lap, staring up at them, begging them both to look.

It had been early on, in the honeymoon years, as Dean thinks of them, not long after he’d gotten Sam back from the real world and tucked him back into theirs, the one that exists between just the two of them. Sam had taken the photo of them with his hand braced on Dean’s hip while they sprawled out on the blanket, Sam’s head tucked up under Dean’s chin as they stared down the line of Dean’s body and at the camera. They’re both smiling, a matching smile of contentment and amusement, of a corresponding love that no one else in the world would ever know or understand.

“I love it,” Sam--now Sam, _his_ Sam--whispers, and his eyes are practically sparkling when he curls around Dean, tucks their foreheads together, and kisses him. 

And maybe now, for the first time, Dean sees a chance for them to heal.


End file.
